Women of substance

Jude Kelly missed a trick when she set off in search of that very British creation, the battleaxe, for this week’s Archive on 4.

Jude Kelly missed a trick when she set off in search of that very British creation, the battleaxe, for this week’s Archive on 4. The stage director and now head of the South Bank Centre in London gave us Ena Sharples and Hattie Jacques, Hyacinth Bucket and Thora Hird but no hair-rollered hyenas from the radio files. Maybe the typical battleaxe was just too loud, too mouthy to work as a caricature on air? Maybe Sharples needed her hairnet and hatchet face as visual props for her powerplay? On air, she would just have sounded like a screech owl, an accusation levelled at many a sharp-witted woman in ages past.

The battleaxe could be cruel with her too-rigid belief in her own rightness, and her determination to control everything within her very considerable orbit. But her moral certainty held things together. ‘I know plenty about you,’ threatens Ena Sharples in her classic confrontation with feckless Elsie Tanner. ‘I know plenty about you that you don’t think I know. I could’ve written a full-length book about you, but if I had written…it wouldn’t ’ave come anonymous, oh no.’ Sharples was never afraid to speak her mind or own up to what she believed.

Where did the battleaxe originate? inquired Kelly, suggesting that she’s a northern invention, emerging from Lancashire, where the cotton mills provided plenty of work for women. The generations often lived together, mothers, grandmothers and mothers-in-law providing free child care but also creating a claustrophobic keg of emotion. Women ruled the roost and in consequence the mother-in-law joke became a fixture in the music hall, a figure of fun not because she was weak-willed and silly but because she held such authority in the home.